The easiest phone I have ever owned (Apple iPhone 8 GB)

Member Name: Snozzberry

Product:	Apple iPhone 8 GB
Date:	15/05/09 (7 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A wonderful pocket sized phone, PC and iPod all in one

Disadvantages: Camera is not the greatest

I have had my iPhone 3G for a month now and I love it!

I went to my local Carphone Warehouse to upgrade my mobile with the full intention of getting a Blackberry Bold. While there I tried out both the Bold and the iPhone and preferred the iPhone immediately. I got the handset free on a 24 month contact for £35 a month.

Setting it up was so easy, you just need to download iTunes (I already had this on my laptop as I also own an iPod Nano), connect your iPhone via the USB cable that comes with it and iTunes does everything for you. So no hanging around waiting for O2 to send set up texts and then hanging around on the phone to them because it hasn't worked properly.

Ten minutes later I had moved on to synching my Yahoo email account. This took a matter of minutes, and there was my whole email account on my iPhone, inbox, contacts, everything.

Next I linked up to my home wireless router - and I must say this was so simple compared to connecting it to my laptop, which I still haven't managed to get working after 18 months!

Within half an hour of arriving home I was all set up and online on my handset telling my friends about my fab new phone!

Using the phone itself is simple. At the bottom of the touchscreen are navigation icons for phone, mail, internet and iPod. Tap on the phone tab and the full phone menu comes up. Here, you can assign favourite numbers, see your recent phone activity, access your contacts (which I have synched with my Yahoo mail account), select the touchscreen telephone keypad and access your voicemail. The voicemail screen shows a list of all messages so you can jump to the one you want to listen to rather than having to listen to them all in order of receipt. Texting is simple and uses a full QWERTY keyboard.

Internet access was my primary motivation in opting for the iPhone and it has not let me down. I have rarely found myself outside of either a wifi hotspot or 3G coverage. You can select your choice of search engine (I use Google), bookmark favourite sites and open new tabs just as you would with a traditional PC. Turn the iPhone sideways and you can read the pages much more easily and it is simple to zoom in and out if required.

The touchscreen QWERTY keyboard is very easy to use and if you accidentally hit the wrong key (as I often do) it will auto correct. If you don't want the suggested word, then simply delete the suggestion and the word you have typed will be accepted in future.

I am not a great one for lots of apps, but the few I do have were so simple to install. Simply tap on the app store icon on the iPhone and select what you want. You can even filter the free ones if you don't want to pay for them. I only use a few - Facebook, ITN news, eBay and Wiki Mobile - but they only took seconds to install. I even have an icon for an internet forum that I am a moderator on there for ease of access.

My emails arrive quickly and the phone pings to let me know that I have received one. In fact, on the occasions that I have my phone changing via the USB cable while I am online, the phone pings to let me know I have an email before the laptop does!

Transferring music across is simple and works in exactly the same way as the basic iPod. I have lots of music on it now, compared to my Nokia N95 where one album later the internal memory was full. 8GB is more than enough for me :)

In the box you get your iPhone, a cleaning cloth, a USB cable and a plug that connects via the USB cable. The phone can be charged at the mains or via USB connection in the same way that iPod does. There is also a small instruction sheet on how to set up your iPhone. It doesn't give much further information on using the device, but frankly the iPhone is so easy to use that you really don't need a book the size of a brick explaining it all to you. It is mostly self explanatory.

The only thing I will say is that you use the internet on it a lot, the battery runs down very quickly, which is understandable. The camera is not the greatest at 2 megapixels, and there is no flash, but the photos I have taken have not been bad considering I was used to a 5mp camera on my old Nokia N95. It also gets grubby very easily but the cleaning cloth that is provided in the box buffs away those greasy fingermarks very easily.

Summary: I love, love, love it!

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